You Have To Keep Things in Perspective
You awoke to news of a solar blast as big as 20 earths, the Ukraine is on the brink of a civil war, as is Venezuelan, and to top it all off radiation has been detected near a nuclear waste facility in New Mexico and snipers are practicing their art using electrical sub-stations.
So many threats and so little time, and you realize you cannot prepare for all possibilities and you have to work on not becoming paranoid. The news alerts however do give you new incentive to tighten up your preparations. You had too many things catch you off guard this winter.
One of the biggest problems you have right now is “too many irons in the fire”. When you first started prepping, you were wide-eyed and innocent. Everyone at the coffee shop and on the Internet blogs had a different conspiracy theory and you found yourself buying into far too many.
You developed a habit of surfing the Internet after days of ruminating with others and it was a bad habit. Some people it seemed had nothing better to do than to put forth conspiracies but you still rushed home to surf the Internet all night and comment on blogs and forums. Days after posting some comments you realized after reading them again you had no idea of what you were talking about, just spewing words like many of the so-called experts that always seem to have time to tell others what they needed to do.
You wanted to know what was coming so you could get ready. The ones that tried to convince everyone they needed to buy this or that never seemed to have those same things themselves. You realized too late in some cases that talk was cheap especially on the Internet.
You know now there is a difference between those that sit around all day thinking up things that could happen to the world and those that actually pay attention to what is most likely to happen.
Some you talked to believe the world was on the verge of erupting at any time and yet when asked about their preparations they were vague about them. The ones getting wide in the bottom and big in the belly would always point off somewhere proclaiming they had the perfect spot picked out for when the SHTF. One day they may gesture in one direction when asked where their bunker or cabin might be and on others days when pressed they would gesture in another direction. You soon realized there were preppers and then there were talkers.
You went over all this in your mind as you sipped coffee and watched the news. This winter for you was a real eye opener. You started out prepping waiting for some spectacular event to happen, you expected it to be sudden and devastating. Instead, it crept up on you. The heating bill was through the roof, groceries were getting so expensive you actually found your eating habits changing dramatically and no relief in sight.
You thought about when you were a child and when the winter cold seeped in, your mother would send you to the basement for canned jellies and peaches that tasted like they were picked that day, it felt like summer in the middle of winter eating those peaches from the jar. The garden plot you started was a mass of frozen clumps of weed, it was never seeded with vegetables and the weeds took over.
A number of times this winter you had to turn around and find a different route to work because of snow blocked roads. The small community where you lived was running out of funds and salt for the highways was in short supply, and road crews cost money and so many of the secondary roads were left to let nature take care of them. Disasters were creeping up on you from all sides.
During the most recent storm friends called for help and co-workers could not get to work because of the snow and ice. You could drive on snow-covered roads you had been doing it all your life so you always went out to help. Cars slid off the road, your friends huddled half frozen in their loafers, and suit jackets, the temperature below zero.
You still have not gotten back the two parkas you lent to a friend and a co-worker. Given to them as they waited for a wrecker to pull them from a ditch or police officer to fill out the accident report. People driving to work in sub-zero temperatures like it was the middle of summer. You could not fault them because you failed to see what was coming as well.
You tried to tell them what they needed to do but your words rang hollow in your own ears because you realized there were so many things you overlooked. You decided to leave the preaching to others, to those that believed in “do as I say and not as I do” kind of talk.
You had to help a panicked neighbor whose water pipes froze because of the cold temperatures. You crawled under your neighbor’s house and discovered ruptured copper lines, the ice bulging from the splits. All you could do for them was to shut the water main off to keep the water from spewing from the pipes when the ice thawed. Your neighbors did not have the funds to get the pipes fixed and you where providing them with water for the time being.
The problem with the neighbors pipes made you scramble to make sure yours were properly wrapped in insulation, prepping on the fly and that was not what you envisioned. Ad hoc prepping is not what you wanted to do but you failed to see it coming and while you managed to keep, your water flowing it was only because of your neighbor’s dilemma.
Yes, disasters had a way of creeping up on you. The little ones, well little compared to what you where expecting, caught you off guard because you essentially walked on dollar bills in your hunt to pick up pennies. You focused on the big bang and neglected to see what was happening now. You got caught up in the abstract and theories.
The house was cold because you where trying to reduce the heating cost. You never thought about weatherproofing a home or looking into a pellet or even a wood stove, as part of prepping. Now you know, and it is too late for this winter. It is like a leaking roof, you cannot fix it in the rain and do not need to fix it when it is not raining. You failed to focus on the here and now.
This last year you have learned a lot about prepping, you realized prepping is a state that must be maintained. You failed to assess the realistic threats. You were looking for the big financial collapse, the nuke dropped on a big city, Iran hacking our power grid and shutting us down. You looked at the horizon for mushroom clouds while disasters swirled about your legs.
You now realize that split water pipes are a disaster for many this time of year and snow-blocked roads are a crisis for a city and its citizens. Lack of salt for the highways is critical for far too many people, it increases accidents, and people’s lives are changed forever because of it. The world ends everyday for far too many people, doomsdays is happening everyday for a family an individual for a city or town somewhere.
Thinking about the smaller things and yet realizing that Iran is still out there, and radiation is still leaking out into the desert in New Mexico. You wonder how longer before people here in the United States rise up and take to the streets because as you know the little things add up until you simply have to do something about them.
Associated Press. (2014, February 20). Retrieved from http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/02/20/radiation-detected-near-new-mexico-nuke-site/?intcmp=latestnews
FoxNews.com. (2014, February 19). Retrieved from http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/02/19/massive-filament-erupts-from-sun/?intcmp=features